Taming the Dragon

Or I think the fountain looks like one :). This is one of the fountains in the gardens of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, handheld

Sun behind the Monastery

Second photo from the Bzovík Fortified Monastery in Bzovik. This time it’s the remains of the main buildings inside the walls. I used double tonemaping on this one. It really works great on stone walls and similar structures.

HDR from 6 shots, taken with Canon 7D, with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Brackets

With each HDR photo, there is a question, how much brackets should you take. For this photo, I used 7. For 90% of all my shots, I use only three shots. This is mostly due to convenience, as taking more on a Canon camera is not so straightforward (and usually not practical). But from my experience, I have noticed a difference between three bracket shots and 7-9 bracket shots. The HDR’s from more shots, are in my opinion, better. The added data really helps to bring out all the detail in a scene and the transitions between dark a light areas, are more gradual, making less problems.

But there are still scenes, where there is no difference. If there is a small dynamic range in the scene your’re photographing, there is no use for the additional shots. But scenes like this, where there is a very high difference between the dark and light areas, it’s really better to go with more shots.

The beauty of Nature

I just love how this one turned out. It even is my current desktop wallpaper (and I never use my own photos as wallpapers :) ). This was such a lovely sunset last weekend. All the green colors, with the sun shining through. It was just beautiful. The only thing I regret, that I forgot my IR filter, because I think that It would create great results in such light. Maybe next time :)

HDR from 7 shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.

Old Castle in Banska Stiavnica

I spend few hours recently in Banska Stiavnica. It’s a very old mining town in Slovakia, and exaclty at the time I was there, they had a festival so the city was full of people. At the end, this worked out great, as the castle was almost empty :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, handheld.

Sunset over Mikulov

The first time I was at Mikulov, I saw, that there is a very nicely situated hill right next to the city. So the second time, I went there, I went directly to this hill and waited for the sunset. And this is what I got :)

HDR from 7 shots, taken with Canon 7D with Sigma 18-200mm lens, from a tripod